Group
Minh Hien Wilson Le Anthony Ho and I
The Vitra Design Museum is an internationally renowned, privately owned museum for design in Weil am Rhein, Germany. As well as Frank Gehry’s several other architects have worked on buildings on the Vitra grounds including; Alvaro Siza, Nicholas Grimshaw, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid in a cross between an industrial plant and a model village. The design of the museum had largely grown according to the subjective taste of both its founder and designer and complemented the surrounding context.
The Vitra Museum was designed to be accessible to the general public and opened in November 1989. In contrast to other museums, the Vitra Design Museum focused principally on its historical and future developments. Like the furniture inside it Gehry designed the structure to be sculptural-expressionistic; the museum displayed elements of materiality, construction, function and form. It is one of the world's largest collections of modern furniture design, including pieces representative of all major periods and styles from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards.
Furniture producer Rolf Fellbaum wished to create the Vitra Design Museum to document the roots and history of his craft; he found that the history of industrialised produced furniture provided a much larger insight - examining the past could give new movement to the furniture of tomorrow. It was here that Fehlbaum commissioned Frank Gehry to design a museum that captured this idea.
The result was large-scale disparate elements dexterously juxtaposed; these sculptural elements were not formally reconciled in a traditional sense. Through collision and disorder, Gehry combined a presence in resolution.
In addition, the museum produces workshops, publications and museum products, as well as maintaining an archive, a restoration and conservation laboratory, and a research library. It also organises guided tours of the Vitra premises, a major attraction to those interested in modern architecture.
It was Gehry's intention to understand and to extrapolate from the context - to set up a dialogue of the relationships to the highway, the hills and smaller scale buildings. His solution was an urban village which placed the study museum at the front - a sculptural strategy that compositionally includes the factory building in the perception of the museum. Gehry takes ordinary elements: stairs, ramps, a lift tower, a corner window; pulls them apart and reassembles them to challenge our notions of what a building should be. The complexity of the exterior does not interfere with the background role that is necessary for a room in which to view sculptural objects. The gallery space was kept intentionally basic with natural top light.
The museum building is an architectural attraction. It was Frank Gehry's first building in Europe. Together with the museum, which was originally just designed to house Rolf Fehlbaum's private collection, Gehry also built a more functional-looking production hall and a gatehouse for the close-by Vitra factory. Although Gehry used his trademark sculptural deconstructivist style for the museum building, he did not opt for his usual mix of materials, but limited himself to white plaster and a titanium-zinc alloy. For the first time, he allowed curved forms to break up his more usual angular shapes.
He once explained his style as simply designing a room at a time, rather than a building as a whole. His design influences are evident and reinforced by motifs such as the central cruciform roof light and rejection of conventional.
References: Great Buildings Online
Frank Gehry: Vitra Design Museum, by Olivier Boissiere an Martin Filler; Thames & Hudson Ltd, London 1990
The Sunday Times, November 5, 1989 "Rebuilding the terms of the design debate"
